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The ecosystems of the San Francisco Bay estuary are influenced by the salinity of its waters, which in turn depends on flushing by freshwater inflows from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Estimates of full-natural flows in eight major rivers that flush the Bay are analyzed here by extended empirical-orthogonal-function analyses to characterize distinct ‘modes’ of seasonal flow and runoff variability. These modes provide a clear identification of the seasons in which the various rivers respond to hydroclimatic forcings and the seasons during which the rivers most strongly affect San Francisco Bay salinities. About 60 percent of the runoff variability is shared by the rivers over the course of a year but season-to-season...
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Spring snowmelt is the most important contribution of many rivers in western North America. If climate changes, this contribution may change. A shift in the timing of springtime snowmelt towards earlier in the year already is observed during 1948–2000 in many western rivers. Streamflow timingchanges for the 1995–2099 period are projected using regression relationsbetween observed streamflow-timing responses in each river, measured by the temporal centroid of streamflow (CT) each year, and local temperature (TI) and precipitation (PI) indices. Under 21st century warming trends predicted by the Parallel Climate Model (PCM) under business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions, streamflow timing trends across much of western...
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The passing of seasons, as gauged by annual events or phenophases in organisms' life cycles, is arguably one of the most pervasive environmental variations on Earth. Shifts in seasonal timing, or phenology, are observed in flowering and other stages of plant development, animal migration and reproduction, hibernation, and the seasonal activity of cold-blooded animals [e.g., Schwartz, 2003; Root et al., 2005]. As an important life history trait, phenology is an object of natural selection; depending on timescales, shifts in phenology can lead to evolutionary change. Thus, phenology is not only an indicator of pattern in environmental science, but also its variation has fitness consequences for individuals, and these...
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A realistic description of how temperatures vary with elevation is crucial for ecosystem studies and for models of basin-scale snowmelt and spring streamflow. This paper explores surface temperature variability using temperature data from an array of 37 sensors, called the Yosemite network, which traverses both slopes of the Sierra Nevada in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park, California. These data indicate that a simple lapse rate is often a poor description of the spatial temperature structure. Rather, the spatial pattern of temperature over the Yosemite network varies considerably with synoptic conditions. Empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) were used to identify the dominant spatial temperature patterns...
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Short-term climate and weather systems can have a strong influence on mountain snowmelt, sometimes overwhelming the effects of elevation and aspect. Although most years exhibit a spring onset that starts first at lowest and moves to highest elevations, in spring 2002, flow in a variety of streams within the Tuolumne and Merced River basins of the southern Sierra Nevada all rose synchronously on 29 March. Flow in streams draining small high-altitude glacial subcatchments rose at the same time as that draining much larger basins gauged at lower altitudes, and streams from north- and south-facing cirques rose and fell together. Historical analysis demonstrates that 2002 was one among only 8 yr with such synchronous...
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